Lake Ahquabi State Park

A few miles west of Indianola, a lake that did not exist before the Great Depression now anchors one of Iowa's most beloved state parks. Lake Ahquabi is not a natural lake at all. It is a testament to what the federal government and a generation of young men accomplished during the worst economic crisis in American history.

In nineteen thirty-four, the city of Indianola acquired the first five hundred sixty acres of Warren County farmland with the intention of building a park. The labor to build it came from Company Seven Sixty-Nine of the Civilian Conservation Corps, the New Deal program that put unemployed young men to work on public lands across the country. The young men of Company Seven Sixty-Nine arrived in late nineteen thirty-four. They were working in Iowa during the depths of the Dust Bowl and Depression, when millions of Americans had no jobs and no prospects. The CCC paid them thirty dollars a month, of which twenty-five dollars went directly home to their families.

Over the next three years, these workers built the lake itself by damming a stream, then constructed every major structure in the park using the Rustic style championed by the National Park Service. The design philosophy was deliberate: buildings should look as though they grew from the landscape, using native stone and timber, simple forms, and handcraft details that mass production could not replicate. The park's entrance portals, the bathhouse, the refectory, and the picnic shelter were all built this way. Three historic areas within the park have since been listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The name Ahquabi comes from a Fox word meaning resting place. The lake opened in May of nineteen thirty-six and has been drawing swimmers, campers, and anglers from the Des Moines metro ever since.